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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Y. Torikai et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1057-1060
Contamination and Waste | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12598
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A batch process concept for the decontamination from tritium of fusion reactor materials based on a hydrothermal treatment is under development at HRC. Essentially, tritium-loaded material is heated in a tightly closed vessel containing a defined amount of water. The objective of the water is to “capture” the released tritium in a small volume of liquid. For the detritiation, stainless steel temperatures in the range 393-473 K over a period of several days were found to be adequate. From the results it appears that by and large the released tritium accumulates in the purposely introduced water. The achieved degree of decontamination was estimated from the tritium concentration in the water and the tritium that remained in the decontaminated material. Tritium trapped in the surface layer of stainless steel was not reduced by the isochoric hydrothermal treatment in the same proportion as that in the bulk.